Bill Gurley: Break Free From Career Regret and Design Work You Love | Career | YAPLive | E387

does not want to take a meeting in anything on AI."

Bill Gerley is a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a super investor, known for early investments in companies like Uber, Zillow and Next Door. "People aren't dead engaged in happy in their careers. We ask a thousand people, if you could start your career over again, would you do something different?" 7 out of 10 said yes. "Wow. AI is moving so fast. My advice for anyone in any field that's afraid of AI is run at it."

"You also started your career at the start of the dot com bubble, and you saw that whole thing explode. How did that actually change the way you think about investing in companies, change the way you think about sustainability?"

One of the things that happens anytime there's a technology wave is people get rich quick

and then a whole bunch of people see people getting rich quick and they rush in. I like it when they're not around. When you're in a bubbly time and we may be right now where they are, people do silly things. Things that don't usually work, they get very speculative. "You've been ahead of the curve so many times. Can you give us a prediction about the future of work or technology? Something that we might be underestimating or unexpected?"

“"I think there will be a lot of money made in."”

Yeah, fam. 7 out of 10 people say they choose a different career if they could start over, and it's not because they lack talent. It's because they chose the safe path. Today's guest has had a front row seat to what actually drives long-term success. Bill Gurley is a legendary silicon valley venture capitalist and a super investor, known for early investments in companies like Uber, Zillow, and next door.

After decades backing billion dollar founders, he noticed a pattern.

The most successful people didn't follow the conventional route. They built careers around what genuinely fascinated them. In this episode, we unpack lessons from Bill's new book, running down a dream, including how to avoid career regret, staying relevant in the age of AI, and designing a career driven by curiosity, smart pivots, and continuous learning. Bill, welcome to Young Improveding Podcast. "Thanks for having me."

I'm so excited for this podcast, and I've heard about you for a very long time, now we get a chance to sit down together. So you are what people have called a super investor. And now you've come out with a career's book called Running Down a Dream. And a lot of people might be thinking like, "What is a VC guy? No about careers, and why is he putting out a book about careers?" You could be putting out a war book on Uber or your times at

“benchmark, the VC firm, right? So why did you decide to write a book about careers?”

You know, as I reached the end of what was definitely my dream job. I loved being a venture capitalist, but I reached a point where I decided it was time to hang up my boots, and it was time for me to move on and leave the field for younger people to succeed. I felt the calling to write this book, and it was something that I'd stumbled upon like eight years ago, an idea that had popped into my head. I used to write a lot of blog posts, and when I would get an idea, I would scratch it

down, and sometimes it would become a post on a lot of times. It just was living in a document. And this one was an idea that came to me and I had read these three biographies and noticed that these three people had all done similar things. And I wrote down the notes, I then got invited to give a speech at the University of Texas here in Austin, and I put it together and gave that speech. And then a number of people saw that speech, probably most notably James Clear,

“and people then started pushing me, you know, one day you should make that a book,”

and as I reached the end of my career, you know, and I people had talked to me about writing a book before, you're right. I could have written about investing, I could have written about tech, I could have written about venture capital, I could have written about Uber, and this was just felt more personal to me. And now that it's done and it took a long time, I'm certain at this point that this book has a bigger chance to help more people than any

of those other books. Oh yeah, for sure. I feel like this applies to anybody whether they're just starting or they're, you know, 45 years old and new career. I absolutely love to like some of the gems that I found in the book. So you started this project doing some surveys, and you found out that people were really unhappy with their jobs and at work. So talk to us about that. Yeah, when we decided to make the book form, and I say we because I worked hard with my editor,

and I hired a co-writer for some of it, and we did a lot of research, and one person prodded us to go look at the academic work on careers, and we talked to a lot of the best professors

and we asked a thousand people, if you could start your career over again, we'd do something different. And seven out of ten said yes. Wow. And we did it again with Wharton and did it more scientifically, and it was still six out of ten. But a huge number for people to think they have career regret. And there's work that Daniel Pink has done where he talks about as you grow older, it's your regret to have an action that way, most on your brain, like the things you didn't do.

Most of us are pretty easy on ourselves when we make a mistake. We're like, oops,

and we move on, and you don't ruminate on it much. But that thing you never tried,

just eat that, you as you get older. And so I'd like to believe, and we could talk about this as well. But I'm fairly certain that we've gotten so systematic about how we drive kids, you know, from being 12 years old into college, that we're putting blinders on a most, and they're not

“having the opportunity to roam around and explore and find what they love. And I think I'm a parent”

of three, it is very, very hard for a parent to not want their child to be economically successful. And so you have this little voice in the back of your head, it wants to push them towards the jobs that are considered safe, you know, to the safe jobs. Now, ironically, with a eye,

many of those quote, "safe jobs" aren't that safe. But I would look back before a eye,

and the survey work that we had done and other work gallop poles and whatnot. You know, people aren't that engaged and happy in their careers writ large. Yeah, it's a real problem. And so you're, you're alluding to this concept you talk about in the book called the career conveyor belt, right? Yeah. Like we just put people on this path, and you know, you're supposedly supposed to get a really great job, and that just doesn't really happen anymore. There's so many

college students who graduate, they can't get jobs. There's so many people struggling out there, even getting laid off, even if they had a great job. So talk to us about why society kind of

pushes people this way. And what's the alternative? Like, what should you encourage your kid to

“do instead of just going to college straightaway? Yeah, I think it's well-intentioned. I don't think”

it's just apparent. I think the counselors, everybody, it, it, it, you, it comes from the heart, like you really want them to be okay. But we've gotten into this place, Jonathan Hight calls it the resume arms race, where like I said by the time you're sixth grade, your parents are worried about whether your college application is going to be successful or not. So they're pushing you to play cello and volunteer at the thrift store. And like you're doing all these things, these kids

are booked solid. You know, when I was young and I've heard this from other people, my aid, we'd roam around the neighborhood. No one knew where we were. But that doesn't happen anymore. There's just pressure, pressure, pressure. And I think it has the concept, double negative consequence. One, they don't get to kind of explore and play and find what they love. And two, they're just burnout. You know, they're just burnout. But then it even gets worse to college.

If you go back 10 or 20 years, everyone would go to college as a generalist. And you wouldn't declare your major and to the end of your sophomore year. Nowadays they make you apply to a major. And so you're putting the pressure on the kid to make the decision about the major when they're a junior in high school and filling out applications. And they just don't know.

“Yeah. I mean, I've talked to so many of them. I'm like, what do you want to be?”

Yeah, I don't know. Like they just don't know yet. And there's other data in this great book designing your life where five years after college, like 40% of people have already moved on to a career different than their major in life. By 10 years, it's like 60%. And it may be important to share that information with people so they don't feel the weight. They don't feel that the major doesn't become an anchor. You know, the restricts where they think they can. Yeah, I can even

think back to my journey. I went to college for organic chemistry. And then one year into a kid, I was like, this is not for me. Yeah. I ended up dropping out of college working at a radio station for two years. Yeah. Came back to college and was like, waste, smarter and ready for it. Transition to marketing. And then here I am using those skills. You know, I think there's a lot of data that suggest people that have roamed around and moved in different directions tend to land in a better place.

One, they're more passionate about. They've explored and had a, you know, at this time to kind of

Yep. To go after it. Yeah. If you find out you, you, if you, if you put in eight years grinding

and find out you don't love something, I don't know if you have, you don't know how much you have left, you know, to pivot. Yeah. And as I was reading your stuff, I've felt very connected to it because

“I do feel like I've been obsessed with podcasting and things like that. And that's why things”

have really worked out. So, you know, one thing I would say about that, I think would be especially to your audience. Of course. You know, meeting, when you got promoted book, you meet a lot of publishers and you meet a lot of podcasters and a lot of these people love what they do and a lot of them have taken an independent path. Like you didn't apply for a podcast degree and, and get it. You didn't feel out of job application to be a podcast to write you were crafting your own career.

We, there's a phrase in the book that I used called, you know, become a candidate of one. And I think a lot of people that that are very successful in the world don't think about a career is something where I'm going to pick one off a menu and apply to it. They decide that they want to do something and they go after it and kind of create that opportunity for themselves. And a lot of times, it's acting as an entrepreneur, one. Yeah. So, and now I suspect you consider

yourself in your dream job. Totally designed my dream career. Like I always tell my audience,

my students, like, have designed everything that I do. It never feels like work. I love what I do. I'm very, I think I'm very good at it. And it's because I just enjoy what I'm doing. And in your book, you say, we've got to enjoy what we're doing because it's one third of our life.

“80,000 hours of our life is at work. So, talk to us more about why it's so important to”

optimize our job and do work that we actually love. Well, the, the, the book is separated into into, into two halves that alternate its stories of success, which are called profiles and principles of success, which are the tools. And the stories are meant to inspire you into disinhibiting, make people understand and believe that they can go do this thing. And then the tools are,

are to give people the, the things they need to go be successful. And the very first thing we talk

about is fully understanding what it is you're most curious about. And the reason it's so important is if you really want to differentiate yourself, you really want to be successful, you really want to dent the universe. You have to love learning about what you do, because if you love learning about what you do, and I think the ultimate test is in your spare time instead of watching a Netflix show, you're reading about this thing that you love, you're going to out hustle everybody

else. And the flip side is true. If you don't love it and you're not constantly learning, someone else is, and you're going to have a really hard time keeping up with them. And I find all too often in a lot of traditional jobs. People think, oh, I studied up until graduating from college, and now the learning's done, and I just go in and do the craft. And I just don't think

“that's how the world works, especially in this modern world where if you want to self-learn”

and you want to continuously learn, there's so much at your fingertips between podcast and AI, and all these things, you're going to get out run, because someone's going to get out on the edge in front of you. Yeah. So the old cliche is follow your passion, but you talk more about curiosity over passion. Why don't you say passion? The word passion has become tried, and it's been said so many times. Some people attack it, and I kind of understand that, like, you know,

it's just been overused. I use the phrase chase your curiosity. Psycho gave this great talk at Duke, where he used the phrase "fascination." That's a good word, too. A fascination is like it indicates something that you just can't stop learning about, right? You can't stop trying to figure out if you're fascinating with it. And the great thing is, and you're in this place, I was in that place, the learning feels free if you love it. Yep. Like you're not sitting or going,

oh my god, I got to go read this thing. Like you want to read this thing. And so if somehow you could measure the negative impact of having to do the work for people that really love what they do and really are curious about it or fascinating, but there's no, it doesn't feel like there's work effort put in to the continuous learning. But there's not going to be money in everything that we feel obsessed with, or that we're curious about, right? So how do people navigate that

one of the reasons why from the video to the book released was six years, because I had a real

bias in finding the stories, and that I mostly wanted to find people in non-traditional fields for this reason. Like I didn't want to, there's no McKinsey consultants, there's no investment bankers, there's not even really entrepreneurs, it's more, you have a restaurant tour in a basketball coach and a hairstylist. And by the way, every one of those characters made a ton of money. They didn't start, they, all every single one of them started it because they loved it.

Yep. They didn't start it because they wanted to make money. But I have examples in the book of a gentleman that fell in love with the Grand Canyon and just started writing about it and was able to turn that into a career and there's another gentleman in Houston that did that with Texas Horticulture.

And I, you know, so I somewhat reject the notion that you can't, I think there's plenty of studies

that show rich people that aren't happy. Right. And again, these people that are doing what they love every day and having audience for it and people that reach out to them have a level of personal happiness and satisfaction that's just super high. Yeah. And when you're so positive what you do, you're so good at what you do, you know, the most, and even with a small niche or small audience, there's opportunity with them. No done. And by the way, I think it's a fair question that you pose.

And I was having a discussion with a career counselor at one of the top universities in the country. And this topic came up and she said, well, what if they studied English poetry or something? And I'm like, and I gave her the two examples I just gave. And I said, I know I think even there,

“you could probably make a career. And then she goes, "But you have to work really hard."”

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that really clicked with me is a fact that if you enjoy the preparation of your job, that's like a really good signal that you're doing something that you love. If you actually enjoy the prep work. So for people tuning in, what are some other signals or questions they can ask themselves to judge whether or not they're on the right path? Well, a couple of different things. And we have a whole chapter dedicated to this topic and give, I literally went and studied

all the other advice, all the greats had given and tried to make it a laundry list so that you could try every one of these things. And there's so many different fun little exercises you can do. Dave Evans and Stanford who did designing your life, he talks about create like three to five different profiles and spend a couple of hours writing out each one of them and kind of living with it in your brain and then do it the other and then you can battle card them, which is an interesting

way to really test which one you're most excited about. Your intuition when you do that will typically pick up on one of those. There's a great story in the book. There's a gentleman from here in Austin

that spent the first part of his career in seismology and then he became a mortgage broker and he's

watching a PBS show one night and they have this idea where you take a sheet of paper, you draw the line down it, you put what you love to do on one side and what you're good at on the other and try and find the middle ground. That gentleman's name is Bert Beverage and that exercise led to him starting a spirit company called Tito's vodka. Oh wow. The most successful spirit business in America right now. Yeah and like he hit the idea to do that came from that exercise. So we have

a ton of those exercises here. The other thing that Angel Duckworth talks about a lot is just don't be afraid to move around, you know, in this happened twice in my career. I was in a job, I was doing fine, I was making plenty of money but I did this exercise in my head where I said, "Do I want to do this to rest in my life?" Just a moment of reflection. I said, "Do I want to spend 30 years doing what I'm doing now?" And in both of the first two cases I reached a point where

I was like, "No, I'm pretty certain I don't want to do this for 30 years." And then I moved on. And I think having the gumption to move on and the confidence to move on is hard but super valuable if you know you're not there and I don't regret either of those two stopping points in my career. I built upon them and they were both relevant and they both helpful to what I did later.

“So I think, you know, one thing that's important on that point for very young people,”

if you get a job and immediately build your expenses right up against that salary, then you might not have the flexibility to pivot down the road so be careful. Yeah, you know.

how they should you know start falling their dreams to your point when they have no money.

But first I want to spend a little bit of time on your career too because I want to understand

how obsession played in your career. You started at Compact. You went to Wall Street. What did you feel like you were obsessed with that led you down? Okay, they say it's super easy. So like many people who ended up in Silicon Valley, I had a computer early in my life so I had a Commodore Vic 20 plugged into a TV. Didn't have memory. I don't think we know it that way. Yeah, it was early, really early. But I found I liked writing programs. It was like very fulfilling. And so when

I went to the University of Florida, I got a computer engineering degree. I enjoyed that process and went to work at Compact, which at the time was a very hot start-up in Houston in the

personal computer industry. And yeah, so that was the first one and that was the reason I got there.

What happened was two years in we started the third project from when I had joined and it looked like the second project, which looked like the first, which is part of what got me wondering if I was going to grow bored doing this type of work. And then when I was at home, I had read this book one up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch and I had started trading stocks. So that once it went into this test in my free time, I was playing with something else. I wasn't learning about

the work. I was learning about this other thing. And so I went to business school and it up on Wall Street. It was awesome. Being a man hat and then you're late 20s just fantastic. That's so many great people, that's so many great investors. And enjoyed reading about investing, enjoyed being a part of Wall Street. Once again, no three years in, I just started to think about the job and what I was doing every day and said, "Do I want to do this my whole life?"

And came to once again to a conclusion, "No, I don't." And I had along the way been building up this thought process that I wanted to be in venture capital. And the opportunity came to move to Silicon Valley. And from there I was able to get into venture. And three years into venture, I didn't have that, I didn't have that same discussion with myself. I knew I was in the right place.

“So do you think investing was really your obsession?”

It's a combination of things. I love technology. I loved understanding how it could be disruptive and how people could. And by the way, this is true for all entrepreneurs, how people could ride the edge of what was changing and then become successful. The book innovators dilemma walks through exactly how that works. And then this is a little more personal, but when I was in college, we started going to Vegas and counting cards and playing Blackjack. I do think there was a little

gambler mentality in there. And those things combined. Interesting. Investing tech, gambling, a little bit disruption. And you put those all together and designed your dream career as a VC investor. Yeah, it's putting all of this together. You know, I would say one more thing just because I

“know you have a lot of founders and entrepreneurs in your audience. I think there are certain”

people that have some form of ADD or they're just highly distracted and they get a lot of satisfaction out of diversity. And I'm one of those people. So whether it was working on Wall Street or as a VC, a consultant would have this, you're just looking at so many different things simultaneously in that breath matters to me. And one of the reasons that I left that engineering job is I felt that it didn't have that. And I was kind of, you know, down in the weeds, I've met ton of

wonderful founders who have to have their hands on the steering wheel and want to be in that position. And I think those jobs are complementary to one another. But people, if they get in touch with which one of those people, they are, may impact what career they want to go after. Totally, totally. So if somebody is younger and they want to design their dream career, they may want to college, they're in their first job. How do you suggest that they start actually

“you know, taking the steps toward independence and designing their own dream career?”

So we walked through a lot of it in the book, but I think it starts with learning. And once again,

it's never been easier cheaper, more free, more accessible. Information is just, like, you're

so advantage to do this today versus 10 years ago versus 20 versus 30. Like, you'd have to

So start the learning process and there's so much great content out there. In any industry,

there's typically a podcast or 10 that you can go watch and learn and listen to the best there's stuff on YouTube. You can talk to AI until you're blue in the face. So you can just

“infinitely learn. One thing that I think is highly differentiating for someone is to learn”

the history of their field. I was going to say you call it like the canon. Yes, and most people don't take the time to do it, but it will make you look very differentiated because it shows respect. And I also think there's a element of just bedrock knowledge that's nice to have. Yeah. There's an anecdote in the book where there's this world chest tournament and they take a pause and do a trivia contest and Magnus Carlson wins the trivia contest, which I think is

interesting. Was he a good chess player? He's the best chess player in the world, but I think he knew all the history as well. Yeah, because he was an expert in his field, so the history was a part of it. The other way, I think there's a barbell thing here. The other way to really differentiate yourself is to know the edge. And so if you, I mean, it's silly as it sounds like if you really know how TikTok works and then you want to break into sales or marketing

or PR, like that's hugely differentiating. Like the people that have been in those roles for 10 or 15 years probably don't understand it at all. And so even if, you know, you're chasing a field that doesn't feel like TikTok is the main part part of it, it could be highly relevant to what makes you look different as you apply for jobs in those areas. 100%. Especially for young people, like knowing the edge of these technologies, AI is another one, like it's just a great way

to separate yourself. And if you combine those two, you look really interesting. I totally agree with you on that. I can even think about from my own experience, like how I remember when I first started, I actually was in corporate for like a little bit. When I first started corporate, I was 28 years old,

never had a corporate job before because I was in radio, I started to blog, I started all these things.

I got into corporate and thought I was going to be so behind. But I actually was so much more tech savvy and new had a hack linked in and that promoted so quickly because I knew more than the other people who started at 20 years. Yeah. So it's really interesting that you say that I love that idea of actually studying the history of an industry and also like the unsexy knowledge,

“which I think a lot of people miss. Like I think of people who want to be there's so many”

people who want to be popcasters, but they don't know how like CPMs work and how popcasters even get paid and even really popular popcasters don't know that stuff. So talk to us about the importance of learning the unsexy stuff. You know, I had this experience in my life that it was

really amazing and you know, it's fortunate to have this and sound like I'm named dropping,

but a partner of mine at benchmark. One at auction at dinner with John Lassiter who was the creative genius behind Pixar and we went to we got invited to John's house and he has a viewing room there. It was not that big surprise but a big one and they served us a 10 course meal and each course had a cartoon that had that John felt was one of the defining early cartoons in the history of cartoons and he would before each course he would describe why this one mattered most to him

and there was stuff from Japan and there was steam but Willie and all these these things and you're like I mean that's where I get back to there's so many of these people that are that are to top of their field that have this like just super respectful understanding of the history and I have to I have to believe that it matters. I think it matters both in terms of like a great test is to

“whether you should even be doing this or not like if that feels tedious you know that's not your place”

but also it's so differentiating. I mean just imagine yourself and I think we could pick any field imagine you're in a let's say you're interviewing for a sales job and you have found and you could do this with a five minutes you found the 10 like people who were the originators and thinking about sales execution and sales techniques and you start dropping that you know in the interview like no one else is going to do that none of the other people and someone's going to go like

holy crap this person really cares like you know they really care about this field yeah

yes that's true you know you're making sure that you really understand the history and when I think about podcasting it's pretty new so I guess I would study like TV and radio right if and for AI what would you study the internet well I mean there are some people that have been

“working on AI for 10 or 20 years yeah AI is moving so fast I think you should spend every last”

minute just using just easy every tool you can I you know I kind of separate from the book but I I have my advice for anyone in any field that's afraid of AI is run at it like no know what it's with these the edge of possibility for AI in your field and and learn how to harness it the same way you talked about what you knew about LinkedIn and what not you have to be that with the AI yeah like the last thing you want to be as an AI skeptic who hasn't tried any of it

totally you're you're you're you're on the firing line if that's you and don't stop at Chagy we tea there's so many other apps out there I know I'm myself like I'm addicted to Chagy we tea it's like trying to just try and all and and ask you can ask them this but it's kind of circular but but what is the edge of AI usage in your field and understand what that is and play around with it there and I meet people especially older people I'm almost 60 so I can I guess I can pick

on old people but they like they said oh AI doesn't work I tried it and it gave me the silly area and they're proud that they found the error and I'm like have you tried it you know a year like have you tried it two years ago a year ago and today like and tested whether it's still making that error because it's getting better constantly you know and so if if anyone's out

“there who's just like skeptical or naive I you know I think that's really dangerous I totally agree”

and we were just talking about how it's so important for younger you know people to get skills how do you think AI is changing the way that we acquire skills and how do you think AI is changing mastery yeah I think it's insane like it's such an accelerant like you can learn about anything and I'm probably doing 30 searches a day on how I'm on it like I can't do anything without it any

more I always wanted right it's the comes the number one way you start to learn about something

yeah me me too me too I think it's quite ironic that people feel like oh my god AI is coming and my jobs at risk when if you're if you have the gumption to be at the edge of your field and to be really differentiated and have this love affair with what you do oh my god it should allow me to separate from the field like this should be my finest moment not something to be afraid of do you ever feel like AI is changing the way that your brain works good question um

“I think I'm constantly asking myself that question and I'm skeptical like I don't take”

anything as a tourism so I try again but it's possible yeah I I say that because sometimes I'm

like I feel like in the past I would have you know now I'm always like you know bouncing back

and forth between AI and my work right and in the past I would have I feel like well I probably would have thought of this on my own without bouncing back and forth between something and now I feel like I always need to bounce myself back to you know what I'm saying yeah yeah you might be limiting your own imagination by not giving yourself enough free time to ponder the possibilities to be like time box no no AI use your brain you know yeah I think that's a good I think that's

good call up okay so let's say your mid career 40 years old yeah made money but you have responsibilities yeah what do you do if you find that you are not living out you're passionate like

wait what we have a chapter in the book called Never Too Late where we highlight a number of people

that had their defining career start after 40 I don't think it's easy for the reason you bring up which is commitments um one of one of the people we profile on that chapter is saltcon who created the Khan Academy and salt was it and it worked at a hedge fund was doing rather well I think fortunately his wife was working also and and he was doing something on the side helping a family member overseas that led to the creation of the tools that became Khan Academy and

he felt drawn to doing it as a nonprofit which makes that math even harder but his wife was

and once again I think having the flexibility to do that as part of living within your means

they couldn't have done that otherwise yeah but look what happened I mean they're very few people on this planet that have changed the world as much as saltcon has yeah they we actually and I interviewed him a little while wonderful guy yeah one of the guys on the acquired podcast came up with this idea that was a really loved cult side hustles yeah and he says while you're at a job they'll probably let you do something else if you're

willing to do it in your off-hours or whatever and especially as nothing to do with the job yeah right and so he gives examples of three different stops in his career where he intentionally did something else on the side one of them was at Microsoft he started Microsoft Garage which was this community of of entrepreneurs using Microsoft projects and that get let them do a whole different set of connections and networking than if he had just set there in the job they had

defined for him and then when he got to Madrona he started a podcast on the side he said to the people at Madrona can I do a podcast from the VC firm they said yes sure and of course now he's he's one of the most successful podcasters on the planet loves what he's doing but but the experimentation of this side hustle gave him exposure to new things and and in both those cases in a very differentiated way so that's another thing you could do if you're

40 totally you know ask yourself could I would the would the career I'm in the company I'm

“at let me go do this other thing totally well that's that's what I did to my podcast started”

the side hustle while I was working at Disney there you go right and me and the acquired host what's his name uh been Gilbert been Gilbert we are competing for an i-harp podcast I don't know or it's like is this an finance now it's not up to it's up to industry panel to decide but you know for me the best podcast or when one of the things that you talk about in your book is the importance of mentors and you talk about local mentors versus

aspirational mentors yeah what's the difference between the two I find a lot of people I mean a lot of people that write person of all the books talk about mentors it's not a unique topic but what I find happens most in the real world is people get too greedy too early and they they say why they they either cold call someone they shouldn't yeah um that's that's out of reach or they get frustrated

because oh I could never get this person to be my mentor so they kind of give up and um that's all

because I think they stretch too far too early so what I recommend people do is create a list of aspirational mentors these are not people you're going to call call tomorrow they're people

“that you can watch from afar you can study what matters to them you can watch them on a podcast”

or on YouTube and you can learn and you can follow their career than one of my profiles is of Danny Meyer the great restaurant tour in New York and he did this when he decided he was going to be a restaurant tour he made a list of his either ten or twelve of the people that were changing a restaurant industry and he kept a notebook of him and a profile of him and he studied what they did he ended up meeting every single one of them along the way but he didn't call call him at the

beginning of the journey and I think that's important and if you study him the way we just described one day when you do meet him you know so much about him back to the history that he did he had right that it's easy to kind of make the connection like and you don't do it so what I recommend is you do that kind of studying aspirational mentors and then for your for your in-person mentors you just need to be more realistic like about how far you reach and the truth of the matter is

people in the second tier get almost zero ask so if you're more willing yeah they're going to be

more willing they're going to be flattered to ask them so you know whoever it is you think you want like just go one or two levels down and you'll probably find someone who's thrilled that you reached out super honored and you're much more likely to get help yeah what's up yaf gang when you start a business nobody really tells you how many hats you're about to wear one minute is it creator the next year the marketer then you're the finance team and customer support before you know it

“it can feel like way too much on your shoulders but that's why I love Shopify and what it”

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again that's Shopify.com/halla young and profitors this year I'm all about not missing opportunities and for me that starts with not missing any calls because a miss call is money walkin out the door close spelled Q-U-O is a business phone system that helps you in your team handle calls and texts from one shared number think of it as an email inbox but for your phone everything stays

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for people who are really just trying to like grow on this journey of being like top of their field in a career that they love and one of the things that you mention is publicly learning like learning in public you did this with the blog that you started a lot of creator entrepreneurs nowadays who are building personal brands they're also learning publicly and there's so much benefit to that can you speak about that yeah and I look I don't know if it's for everybody

and I've watched people be successful in venture capital that don't do it but it's certainly a way to differentiate yourself is to create content on your field and to share that content publicly as you say and you know ironically Warren Buffett has historically done this every year there's a great bond investor name Howard Marks who writes how to start there there are two benefits to it straight up one when you write things down and and you know you're going to

publish some publicly you really test the all the theories in your brain you really work things out you accomplish what you are afraid you're not doing by just using AI because you you really don't want to there to be in consistency so you really think through it and you give your brain a really

good once over I think on the subject matter and then the second thing is it differentiates you

with LinkedIn and Twitter DM and all this stuff you know you start writing you're going to create avenues for networking yeah and so it's a way to differentiate yourself I don't know if it's for everybody and I don't know if in all fields your employer will allow that's true yeah but I think in most cases I think it it does help it could be it can be very very helpful you also mentioned

“this concept of infinite games how life is a clean infinite game and you're better off being”

generous than having sharp elbows yeah how have you been generous in your career can you give us some examples or other you know personas and stories about people being generous so this topic I think comes up in the chapter we have on peers called embrace your peers and it's probably my favorite of the principles in the book mainly because I don't think it's a subject it's well it's not well

studied in the in literature like I think I might be one of the first people really pushing on this

subject but peers can be inside your company it can be outside but it's it's think about it as a co-a-volving journey and the reason I use the the infinite versus finite games so many much of what we think about from a strategy perspective comes from finite games that we play

“that you play over and over again and there's a winner and a loser and in most career fields that's”

just not how it works like there's hundreds and hundreds of winners and if you find a way to connect and lock arms with your peers and and share with each other be vulnerable with each other you just get a massive lift and there's a there's a great story in the book about mr beast and when he was starting his journey with just probably similar to where you were getting into podcast when he was getting into youtube there weren't it wasn't a field yeah like and he found three other people

there were on that same journey as he and they were on 16 hour Skype calls all day long and he he he very cleverly used the Malcolm Gladwell phrase 10,000 hours and said we got 40,000 hours because we're learning together and sharing and he also said something that I thought was really compelling

he said if a fifth person had been on those calls they made a million dollars like almost de facto

because the stuff they were learning was so new and relevant and and and and and executable you know that you could go win if you knew these things and they were discovering I'm for the very first time and the phrase sharp elbows I have worked inside of organizations where there are people that just aren't good peers you know they hogged the limited equipment they you know they kiss up they you know you can tell who these people are and I would just say stay

far far away from and then the other element of this is get over the notion that you have some kind of proprietary knowledge in your head and it goes part and parcel with the public sharing stuff like even if you have something in your head it's it's so compelling and so wonderful like it probably won't be that way 60 days from now and I just think the benefit of open sharing far out ways some advantage you're going to have by keeping knowledge proprietary to yourself

totally and the value of you know what you get an exchange for that is a personal brand yes you know which is so valuable and it's an asset in itself absolutely the information is going to get stale but your personal brand is just going to keep growing right no doubt the book really has two target audiences so on one hand it's the young person who's they are even maybe up to

made career who really is trying to figure out what they want to do or always wanted to chase a

dream or and didn't know how and and and hard someone who just really needs an extra push to go do that it's for all those people for sure and a lot of people that have read it said oh I want to give it to you know every young adult's going to be handed to saying I hope I hope they take to touch it but the other audience is the parents the counselors the people that are playing a role in this shaping of these careers for other people because I do think that the natural

tendency is to not kind of be supportive and give the right push at the right moment yeah I know you had Matthew McConaughey on and in his book Greenlight he tells this story of he's going to

“he's told his father's whole life is going to be a lawyer and he decides that he now wants”

to switch to film school and he's afraid to tell his father and it's a great scene it really to me speak to the purpose of this book when he finally gets the assumption and tells his father

he expected but the most valuable thing his father could have said he gave him permission responsibility a push told basically told him well if you're going to go do it be really great at it

and obviously it launched an incredible career but but how do for all that second group how

can I help you be as good as McConaughey's dad was at that moment and you know since that there's a sparkle of interest in curiosity and help it flourish yeah because to your point it's not like parents want to do like bad for their children pushing them to become a doctor

“something you think you're doing good right so so it's really important and a lot of people”

I have a lot of friends that feel very resentful of getting pushed in certain careers so you don't want that to happen right and then you I this one father who saw the original speech said me the same as I'm gonna start crying and he he told me a whole story about his child had been going in this direction really wanted to go another one and the he talked about

the kind of stages of himself getting comfortable with it but he said when he finally flipped

and was supportive he saw the child's confidence rise you know and that's just got to be such a wonderful feeling you know and I have to say like I read two books a week you know because my job right so I loved your book I feel like there was so many great things and there there's so many things that I'm gonna even use and like the history thing is something that really stuck with me in terms of like I really just need to know the history of media yeah

“and I think that will just help me as like build this company so thank you for creating this”

but thanks for reading you started in Vc you were behind so many you know huge companies

zillow over stitch fix so many big companies you also started your career at the start of the

dot com bubble and you saw that whole thing explode yeah how did that actually change the way you think about investing in companies change the way you think about sustainability for companies talked to us about those fundamentals if I think oddly in retrospect it was fortunate that I so I started my venture career 97 and things were on fire by 99 but by 2000 they were falling apart and um I did that's not enough time for me to have been successful because from investment

to liquidity back then was five to seven years it's even longer now and so there wasn't a window enough but it also meant it wasn't a long enough window for anyone to judge whether I was good at it or not and when the bubble burst everything slowed down um when you're in a bubbly time and we may be right now where they are people do silly things like they they they spend money in ways they shouldn't run TV ads and superbo ads and all these things things that don't usually

work they get very speculative and I found the bubble part to be uncomfortable but I found the post crash part to be very sane and rational and so I just thought and it was slower which for some of building their career and and also the Charlotte tends to leave town so one of the things that happens anytime there's a technology wave is people get rich quick and then a whole bunch people see people getting rich quick and they rush in and those people

I like it when they're not around but they come in every way so it is what it is with AI you know I have a lot of founder friends and some of them say like you know this year they're only investing in AI companies and it's really hard for them to get funding even if it's a great company with great union economics and and everything like that they can't get funding do you think there's a problem with the investment in AI and do you think that's a bubble?

I think well there's a whole bunch of what you just said but let me start let me start with this high level point that I'd like to make this professor Carlotta Perez

“recognize something that I think is really important to understand which is when there is a wave”

there is massive wealth there is Matt there's disruption and the deck chair switch and people make a lot of money and that's already happened here because open AI and a tropical pain their employees secondary earlier than anyone ever had so the money is being made it's being put in people's pockets and that's going to attract speculators and we hit here in Texas we had a

rush in and so bubbles and waves are actually always happening at the same time so some people will

argue oh if you say it's a bubble your anti-AI no I make the right say the fact that it's real

“is why there's a bubble so I think I think it's important to know that there is a reality right now”

and I feel deeply sad for a lot of founders there's a reality where a modern venture capitalist does not want to take a meeting uninterested in anything on AI and I could if I was forced making arguments why that's the exact right behavior by the venture capitalist but I think it's unquestionably true like there's just zero interest and so that's a tough call for someone that's in a business that may have good unit economics it's not AI what would my advice for them be you know

make sure you understand the edge of AI in your field like I said earlier there may be things are good you know I think it's one out of five that can kind of pivot in a way that makes it really look like an AI company so you don't want it you know if it feels painted on the people will sense that so and then if that's not an avenue for you you know trying you sweat equity to get

“to profitability and own way more this thing than you would otherwise you know and I think one of the”

biggest mistakes a lot of founders make is when you take venture capital it's usually not just they around there's usually it be around in a sea around and your ownership's gonna get way diluted and the number the number one type of company that the bigger companies would like to acquire or smaller companies that are tuck in acquisitions 20 30 50 million dollars and the many you take venture that's off the table like because now the venture capitalist needs a much

bigger outcome yeah and so if you can scrape by you know and I know it's hard

Tito never took venture money he owns a hundred percent of this massive business wow you know

and so if you can do it you know trying to do it and and the the big benefit of doing it that way is your ownership will be a lot higher I want to do like a little mini MBA for the entrepreneur tuning a lot of people who are listening right now are like just starting as entrepreneurs are the got like you know maybe a million dollar company or you know they're just kind of starting out they've got a lot of potential and so you know you've moved away from or in the past you've moved

you moved away from this like grow it all costs model and investing in companies that just want to grow and you were looking at unit economics yeah so let's start there unit economics how can you explain that in plain language for a listeners well I suspect that the smaller entrepreneurs did or living hand a mouth on cash flow are pretty in touch with their unit economics it's the but they might not have a hundred million of it's capital that loose touch with unit economics yeah

it's just a matter of understanding what are the true variable cost associated with the product or service that you're selling and being honest with yourself even despite what the accounting might be the requirement for gross margin but what are the true variable cost so that could include selling and customer service and all these things so that you know the the marginal contribution ideally from a cash flow perspective that you get with each turn of the crank

and it's basically trying to figure out do we make money on a customer compared to how much a cost to acquire them and serve them like we actually making money on them and you know it may be different based on the type of customer the size of customer the source of the lead like all

those things might be different you know you may find I've always found it to be true when you

are aggressive with marketing you have much higher turn like you get customer anywhere as if you can earn a customer through PR or word of mouth they typically stay around longer and so there that's an even tougher mathematical problem because you're trying to calculate um union economics over the lifetime of a customer um currently on yeah and I I know you have a problem with LTV

“I think people get into more trouble with the LTV formula then they do um then they get success out of it”

surprise that well I wrote it's one of my favorite blog posts I've ever written so if someone wants to go deep it's called the dangerous seduction of the LTV formula and it's easy to find on Google um you know

but it's not a strategy and I think people get lost in thinking it's a strategy and and especially if they're someone who's growing their business on a heavy marketing spend and I just in general I would you know the blog post does all this but I would push people you know really really think about could I be winning customers with PR could I be winning customers with with with non-paid social could I be winning customers with product-led growth which is a great um a great way to think about

your product bringing you customers itself like all those things are going to create companies

that are worth 10 times more than someone that's spending heavy on the marketing spend I've never

heard of product-led growth can you explain that yeah um and by the way you could talk to AI or you could you know do Google searches and find people that have written extensively about product-led growth but it is their way to build into the product um the ability to find incremental customers so could you you know one of the things that I've been pushing the stitch fix team to do that I hope will come out soon is here's here's here's your next fix share it with your friends

“and let them vote on what you should keep hmm now you're exposing the company to people”

through the product yeah you're letting the customer share it themselves yes and so the products leading to new customer introductions without these other techniques by the way there's plenty people have done that in enterprise you know slack notoriously had this way where you could invite people outside your work like so it's not just a consumer yeah I think you have ways that your customers through the product can bring in more customers yes that you ping any exactly yes

so if let's say you were mentoring me my company makes seven million dollars a year now okay

what would you want to see in my dashboard in terms of metrics like what kind of metrics would you want to see on a very simple dashboard baseline one one question I would ask you before I I went there is um you know and and I this doesn't I I don't want to ask you questions you don't want to answer but like do you see yourself running this come the independently 30 years from now or do you see yourself potentially selling and selling yeah and so because that matters a

“little bit because you need to think about who the natural acquires would be and how they”

why they would fit it in how do they measure their own business you know and so will this look appealing to them through that lens those kind of things um you know some of the stuff you talked about unit economics like you want to understand it is it'd be great if the marginal customers more profitable than the one before them so that's a test of whether you're starting to get scale in your business right um one exercise that I have the encourage all founders to do no matter

how much the size of the business is forced yourself to do it three three to five year forecast and you don't have enough information to really do it which is why people push back but it forces you to ask the right questions so that you can prepare and if you you know if you want to grow you know a lot for five years your business gonna be pretty big you know and so having having gone to the exercise of filling out an Excel spreadsheet and thinking through what that

means in terms of employees and salespeople and marketing spend all those is a very useful exercise and one that the majority of founders do not naturally do like it's not something they want to do even but they should do these are like one metrics that you look at that's like judges whether

“a company's healthy or not I mean there's so many different business I think certain businesses”

there's a like in like every business after a much of that matter everyone agrees that dollar retention is the one that matters most but that doesn't apply to everything yeah so um so it's kind of dependent on the business again you got to learn your industry yeah it matters in your industry okay so let's play game it's called billionaire ROI ranking okay this is gonna put everything that

we just talked about together I'm basically my first person to play this game or yeah I have new

games for everyone okay so basically you're gonna rank each thing one to ten if it's a good investment for the entrepreneurs listening again it's gonna be stuff that we talked about some things we might have alluded to and you can you know give some color on why you ranked it one to ten so is it a good return on our investments okay okay first one is reading and learning every day oh yeah nine nine out ten maybe ten and that's partially because

Toby the CEO and founder chopify was interviewed in the past 30 days and this was the number one thing he said like just as an example you know and buffet says the same thing you know okay moving to where the action is yeah this is a um so between the talk that I gave at University of Texas and the book form of the speech we added a sixth tenant and it was it was moving to where the action is um I strongly believe that if you can't afford it you'd rather be

an even average player where everyone's doing this thing then being the best player in a market that doesn't rank for that field and if you're a songwriter that means Nashville if you're

“founder that means Silicon Valley if you want to work in finance it means New York City and”

the it's the number of what it really does is the number of chance positive things that are going to happen I probably use the word optionality just goes up 20 acts like you're just going to run into so many people doing the same things and like and if if you go to a job and it doesn't work out there's so many other people hiring for that same thing like it just really changes the dynamic and it probably is important that your someone that is self motivated but but eight out of 10

for most fields there if you if your coach you can't really do that there are some fields we can do it virtually subreddits and things like that yeah I think about I moved to Austin a year ago as a podcast and there's just so much serendipity it just thinks just happened naturally

“that's a great word yeah building a personal brand I think that that's field dependent”

it's always helpful I mean I think there's a I probably rank it below the others let's just say

six out of ten there's always a risk that you become someone who's somewhat performant on the brand side and maybe not developing the real skills underneath it which would could have a negative ramification or someone could view you as shallow if you you know we're doing that so and not all fields I mean there's certain fields where I think it's harder to do but I think if you can it's very rewarding spending heavily on ads well I'm you know I I'm somewhat negative on that but I keep

your your your machine running that was something I don't like it too why is that there's a great new book coming out by David Epstein called Inside the Box where he talks about how constraints drive

creativity and I've always felt that if you're starting a business the easiest way you could

possibly get a customer the the first way the most ignorant person would assume to go get a customer would be to run a Google that like it and and I don't think people are reflective of enough to say wow I'm starting at the very bottom like I'm doing the simplest that's the least creative thing I could possibly be doing like and the hardest and and and I think if you run an exercise which I mentioned in that blog post where you say set to market set to marketing budget advertising

budget to zero now what are you going to do and go run that exercise you're going to come up with

“so many really creative wonderful things that are highly differentiated yeah so that's why I think”

and pay dads are so they pay dads don't work also if you don't have a brand or credibility because they're going to go Google you and not going to be anything there because you started with pay dads okay networking events and conferences I'm I'm a big believer that it can be very very helpful too I think it can help you with both pure and mentor development I think you know

there's probably a limit if you're known as the person that's always out of the conferences you know

didn't they could but but some amount of that there's a great one of my favorite stories in the book is about the athletic director here at the University of Texas Christo Conte and when he was very early working in athletic departments he went to a conference and met four or five other young people there were exact same station and and this is one of those fields where if you're

and this was the only opportunity for those chance moments so it's like going to the action

“but for a point of time yeah and that group of friends stayed in touch started a text group”

started sharing ideas and they expanded a little bit over time but they're now all D1 athletic directors they all wrote to the top so it's a seven or an eight yeah seven or an eight but field field you know field dependent yeah yeah raising as much money as possible well I've historically been very negative on this so I'll put a three on it just to be consistent we the venture industry has evolved and I don't think this affects the vast majority of founders

but the ones at the top the industry is evolved to where most of the rounds are preemptive and proactive which means you didn't start a fundraising process someone thinks you're doing well and knocked on the door and it's forced feeding you money and that is currently the way things

“happen and you end up with these situations where each competitors armed with four hundred five hundred”

six hundred million dollars maybe more and it's not you know it's it's like say it's not your

father's venture capital this is a sport of kings world we've evolved into and it's fight to the death I live through with the Uber lift situation but it I wouldn't wish it on anybody but it's the reality right now and if you sit back and say well I'm not going to be I'm not going to raise as much money I'm going to be you know discipline well if if you're the discipline one and there's six players with five hundred million dollars he turns sales people you're you're not going to

matter so the game on the field is kind of forced people to do this thing I don't love yeah okay next one getting an MBA yeah I'll say seven but part of it's me reacting to the fact that so many people in the entrepreneurial world make fun of it there's a lot of people that should on MBAs in

in the founder world and the problem is some of them I think take that to the level of

dismissing the notion of business learning which I think is really dangerous you know if you don't know how to do a forecast on Excel spreadsheet that could be a real problem and so I just worry that the vilification of it is is not good for the founders themselves because there are resources they need to understand that doesn't mean that to you'll get an MBA but they should read Michael Porter's competitive strategy they should read innovators dilemma they should read

crossing the chasm they should know how to organize a sales team they should like there's just

“all this stuff you need to know that one place you can get it is at a business school but if you”

don't want to go to one that's great but don't dismiss all of the learning as you you know crap on the notion of an MBA a lot of people a lot of people don't align to it well now you can just learn everything online that's true you might not you might not need to go the subject matter is important totally yeah so let's move on to leadership i had Kevin O'Leary on the show yeah and he's another billionaire i think i don't know just just about a billionaire

and he told me how emotions are you know no place for emotions and business he said if you need to fire your mother you fire your mother yeah and it reminded me when I was reading and learning about what happened at Uber with the founder and yourself and how you know he kind of started as a mentee and then you know over time you had to make a really tough decision take us back to those moments what was happening and how are you able to kind of take a motion out of it and just be the

best member of the board that you could be for Uber what one of the things that i would push back on with what Kevin said is the the best CEOs that i've talked to very much lead with the heart and have a i say a passion for leadership that that includes feeling like a shepherd of the flock and so i push back on that a little bit like broadly against business um the situation that that we got into it Uber there was a asset that company that that was shared by many

constituents you know the employees the investors everybody and um we because of several things that had happened things were in a bit of a free fall and we had five state attorney generals

especially in metropolitan areas very quickly because of brand erosion and um and by the way it

wasn't i think history and the press has made it out to be me there were five investors that worked together and signed this letter so it wasn't just me but um i think that there were a number of people that were concerned that a change was definitely going to happen but if you let it happen through the legal world or the government making a change it was going to be six months to 12 months later and the erosion was going to be even more and there were a lot of constituents

in this thing you know a lot of our investors this was such a big number they had already you know

it was already moving the needle for several universities and foundations and if it went away

you know they have paper marks they're going to market down and now felt that weight on me that felt like a lot of responsibility so i've said publicly before you know if if adventure capitalist does their job the right way you don't get to that point so you know the the thing that i wish i had been able to accomplish was through leadership preventing us from getting to the place where that hard decision has to be made and you know if i could play it again i would spend more time on that

than trying to you know play the eventual thing that happened any differently i think we did the best we could do at that moment in new there would be consequences and there were like

“our competitors use it against this constantly but but anyway that's how i would summarize the”

whole do you feel like you made the right decision i based on where we worked at point in time yes

and dar is done an amazing job i mean to take it from there to to $1 billion public company

over 10 billion a year and free cash flow like from where we were yeah unbelievable how do you think about reputation in your career like how important is reputation to you i think it's really important um in in the venture area it's probably in nine like i don't know that it's that high in every other field i don't know that i'd have a good field for um in venture your ability to compete for the next deals everything and that's either enhanced or heard by what the world

thinks of you and and in venture that personal brand can't shine brighter than the even the

“corporate brand a lot of times and so you you just have to worry about it um if you want to be”

competitive you've had like a really rare chance of being close to so many like extraordinary founders that really successful companies yeah what are some of the patterns you see with these founders and i think a lot of it actually ties back to what you wrote in your book probably yeah there's a couple things um they are continuous learners because they're tilting at some new problem on the edge of their field and there's no way um that could be something they learned in school five years

ago because you know it's like a i-ray now everything's changing so fast um basics that said did for his ain't home estimates he wants to feel like this person's gonna do this no matter what that there's this drive and um commitment to attacking the problem that you you just can't take them off of so that's kind of an interesting notion um i think salesmanship is a requirement that people don't talk about enough you're you're gonna raise money you're gonna recruit people

you're gonna lead your team through bad times like you can't do that stuff without being able to sell in some way shape performance people do it in a variety of different ways there's people

“that are raw-rather people that are quiet but you have to be able to convince people to follow you”

and then lastly i would say many many startups have some kind of go-to-market advantage which usually isn't advertising so that they've figured out some bespoke differentiated way to gain new customers aggressively so good you've been ahead of the curve so many times can you give us a prediction about the future of work or technology something that we might be underestimating or unexpected it's so hard right now i mean i love the notion of

everybody's doing the exact same thing and um you know i i think there will be a lot of money made and in verticals like people who figure out how a i applies to something that's very specific to their world um and and at this point in time coding and legal and probably medical or overfunded by the venture capital so there's not much oxygen in those areas but if you can figure

“out what it means for all the other fields that are out there i think there's quite a bit of opportunity”

so the inner section of a i and your field yes and knowing what's possible and what that means bill this has been such an awesome interview i had my show with two questions that i asked

oh yes all right so the first one is what is one actionable thing are young and

profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow um i'm gonna be redundant was what we talked about but i just think it's like continuous learning and like um just setting aside time especially if you're if you're a founder and entrepreneur who's hustling all the time you may feel like you have no time but setting aside sometime there in the week to learn something new and what is your secret to profiting in life you know i i would say you know you asked me a question about why

wrote this book instead of uh doing um book about venture or whatever and there's this great quote

“did life begins where your comfort zone ends and i think numerous times in my life i've been”

willing to kind of try something different or on the edge or a little bit risky and many times those

have paid off and so um i'm not a kind of a conformist like i like attacking things in new ways of like learning new things and so i'd probably say that hmm and would you say some of that is like got intuition is that what you're looting to? i think i use my gut to make the leap and to make the decision to push myself but the willingness to move outside the box to walk away from something to like try something new um you know to not be afraid to to evolve past whatever the current

thinking is if some of all is done and i'm thinking numerous examples in my history where that paid off and where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? well you can follow me on x that's where i have most of my content um there's websites now for the book we're launching a foundation alongside the book i should mention um to for for those people that want to chase their dreams and might not have the financial where with all to do it we're going to

do grants or have an application process oh very cool i'm gonna do that annually um to try and help give them that extra little amount let me know what it launches i'll do some free commercial for you guys to support yeah awesome well thank you vell thank you so much for your time young and profiter sitting down with Bill Gurley was truly a special treat he spent decades studying world class performers and what he shared today challenges so much of the traditional career advice

that we've all been given one of the biggest takeaways from this episode is that the most fulfilled and successful people don't chase job titles or prestige they chase curiosity Bill made it clear that fascination is the real competitive advantage when you genuinely love learning about something the effort feels free and overtime that obsession compounds into mastery opportunity and impact another lesson that really stood out is the importance of becoming a candidate

of one instead of picking a role of a menu Bill encourages us to design careers intentionally and stand out that means deeply understanding the history of your field while also running towards the edge of what's new whether that's AI emerging platforms or a new way of thinking that combination of respect for the past and fluency in the future is what makes people impossible

to replace and finally build our mind at us that great careers are built through exploration

and smart pivots most people who end up loving their work didn't get there in a straight line

“they experimented reflected honestly and had courage to move on when something no longer fit”

progress comes from momentum not from perfection it is episode resonated with you and gave you something you can apply to your life or business please share it with somebody who's rethinking their past right now and if you haven't already we'd be so grateful if you dropped us a five star view on Apple Spotify or cast box this year I'll be doing more in-person interviews so keep an eye out for those on YouTube and Spotify video and while you're there make sure you subscribe and drop us

life and more personal stuff you can connect with me on Instagram @yapathala or linkedin by searching my name it's Hala Taha. Huge shout out to my incredibly apt team as OEs this is your host Hall of Taha, aka the podcast princess signing off.